Touch and Feel: Adapting our Guided Reading Texts

Another Donors Choose project up and running! 

Adapted Version of The Snowy Day

This whole year has been one long exploration into how best to bring reading to students with low incidence disabilities such as autism and intellectual disabilities. It started with trying to adapt our read aloud texts to make them more engaging for my students. After working together with a great team we're getting ready to spend time this summer adapting actual guided reading texts.

Max Cleans Up turned into a touch and feel book

Our school ordered the guided reading books for us and they are already in our hot little hands. Now we just need the artsy materials so we can turn what would be a regular guided reading book into a multi-sensory reading experience to engage our readers. We've put up a Donors Choose project and we're over halfway to our goal (shameless plug: if you donate this week your donation is matched. We have $61 to go, but if you type in INSPIRE as the code at checkout your donation will double.)

Poor man's adapted guided reading book. This summer we'll use velcro to let the kids match words into the texts.

Adapted Miss Nelson is Missing

In my adventures with adapting regular texts this year I learned that the glue, even a glue gun, doesn't stick well to laminated pages. However foam stickers do. The Donors Choose project will get us sheets of sticky back foam paper, foam number and alphabet stickers, foam sticker shapes, and foam sticker animals. It will also get us Wikki Sticks and our own copy of Rhyming Dustbunnies that we'll throw into our pool of texts to adapt this summer.

We are ridiculously excited about our work this summer. Not only will we be adapting text but we'll be working with a reading specialist and a general education kindergarten teacher on making our literacy block model a general education balanced literacy approach. We're leading a training on this in July as well as a series of trainings next year.

Mural, Mural on the Wall

Peep, peep, peep, we've got that beat!

My new favorite read aloud is Farmyard Beat by Lindsey Craig. It's got a fantastic beat so it really promotes reading with fluency. We've had some fantastic interactive read alouds and shared readings with it.

We've been rocking to the beat for 2 weeks now. We started by reading it during reading workshop as a shared reading. We worked on our fluency and reading with expression (and of course just our general reading-love). Then we transitioned into answering those essential 'wh' questions that fill everyone's IEP.

"WHO is in the story?"
"WHERE did the story take place?"
"WHEN did the story happen?"
"WHAT happened first? Second? Last?"

Thanks to our amazing donors choose donations we were able to retell the story with objects. We have the toy barn to give us a visual for where the story takes place, and we have the toy farm animals to give us physical objects to answer who is in the story. It's a perfect story for answering when questions because it clearly takes place at night. The story line itself is pretty good for retelling- first the chicks wake up because they have the beat, then the other animals, and when everyone is dancing Farmer Sue wakes up. They have a huge dance party until they all fall asleep, at which point the rooster, who somehow slept through all of this, wakes up and shouts "Cockadoodle do, I've got that beat!"  (OK, my kids don't actually retell the ending that way, but since I read this story 3-4 times a day between school and home I'm pretty good at retelling it myself.)

It went into the retelling center so our kids could act out the story with the physical objects (the barn and toy animals).

Then we moved the story into writing time and we started to make our mural. We worked on interactive drawing to make the barn, and used interactive writing to add our words. I find interactive writing to be one of the most meaningful forms of writing instruction and I've realized that this year I have not done enough of it.
In just writing the words "peep, peep, peep" on the paper we were able to discuss saying words slowly to hear the sounds, matching sounds with letters, matching similar sounds (what else says p?), using spaces between our words, letter formation, one to one matching, not to mention the message that writing contains meaning, which is why we do it.

Our interactive writing was divided between two days because one sign a day is about all my kiddos can handle.

We also added a math element when we made our animals. We worked on identifying shapes- circles, squares, triangles, and rectangles to make the animal bodies. Then we talked about halves and we cut our circles in half to make the chicks. We were able to practice using the language big and small as we followed directions to put our chicks and cows together.

During another lesson we used 'mat man' to work on drawing our self-portraits that we could add to our mural. Many of my students don't see a purpose to drawing, or independently will not draw a recognizable image. Mat Man guides them to include all the aspects of their bodies- the head, the body, the legs, arms, eyes, ears, etc. We've been using Mat Man since around November and we've seen an amazing improvement in their drawing ability. Their self-portraits for our mural were fantastic.

I think what I love the most about this is that no matter how much I try to squeeze from this book the kids don't ever seem tired of reading it. There is nothing like sharing a good book with a class that goes across curriculum areas.

Play, Beautiful Play

During recess I watched my class recover from their initial disappointment of being stuck indoors because of the rain. They'd tried to convince me that they'd be fine outside despite the rain drops, but regardless we were holed up inside our classroom making the most of it. 

We invited another class in the intellectual disabilities program to join us. Their teacher and I sat back and watched as our kids interacted with each other in pure free play with the toy kitchen, doll house, toy barn, and toy castle (Thank you Donors Choose folks!!). It took a few of them a bit to get into it. At first they sat there, staring at the toys, unsure how to use them to interact with one another. But they slowly became more and more engaged in it.

The deeper into it they got the more we were able to dive in beside them and start working on their academic goals. Beyond just their essential social skills of how to share, listening to one another's ideas, and taking turns with the toys, we were able to really guide authentic practice of vocabulary- 

"Put it on top"

 "Put it under"

 "Make the doll go through the door"

"Can I have the little cup?"

"Who is playing in the house?"

These are skills we work on every single day, sometimes with flashy games on the smartboard that I guess you could technically say we were "playing". But nothing as authentic and student led as this.

We ended up letting them play for an entire hour. They were so engaged in imaginative play and working so calmly, in ways we'd never seen before, that we just couldn't bring ourselves to stop it. I can honestly say that they got more out of that play session than they would have gotten out of the smartboard lesson I'd prepared on Martin Luther King, Jr. 

I think the thing we forget when we think about play in schools is just how much academics our kids get out of play. They need a chance to apply these abstract skills they are learning to their concrete lives- by playing. They can count money, retell stories, use their social language, and read recipes- all while "playing". I watch my 16 month old play kitchen and all I see is how many skills she is learning at that exact moment. She's not playing- she is working hard. Our school kids need that too.

I get so much authentic data from free play- and that's at times when I know the skills are secure- that's when they can do it unprompted, independently, and out of context.

I know I'm preaching to the choir, but I wanted to share our absolutely beautiful hour of learning from this afternoon.